--Health Care For All has reached out-of-state to replace executive director John McDonough, who has joined Sen. Ted Kennedy's staff to work on national reform. The new hire is Amy Whitcomb Slemmer, a veteran advisor to health care organizations -- and once upon a time, a Kennedy staffer.

CNN's all-knowing John King reported yesterday that the McCain campaign has essentially conceded Colorado, along with two other states that Bush won in '04: Iowa and New Mexico. McCain is now forced to put all his eggs into an unlikely (but possible) comeback in Pennsylvania.

Here's his problem. Those three states add 21 electoral college votes to the Obama column.

My good friend Bruce takes issue with my recent commentary on the Presidential race. He is correct that I have steered pretty clear of discussing the Obama/ACORN/Ayers accusations, other than to offer the political analysis that those lines of attack appear to be unproductive for the McCain campaign. But I have not said much about the legitimacy of the issues themselves.

Massachusetts is back on the rise! ...as the nation's leading bogeyman of godless lefty secularism, that is.

Down in North Carolina, where Democratic state senator Kay Hagan is threatening to boot US Senator Elizabeth Dole, a new 2 1/2 minute NRSC ad warns that Hagan is IN THE POCKET OF GODLESS MASSACHUSETTS ATHEISTS!!!!!!!!!

As you may have noticed, a very large number of people -- including the GOP's nominee for President of these United States -- seem to be convinced that there's some massive voter fraud being perpetrated. There's not much new about this; it gets brayed about fairly regularly, and every time it gets looked into, there's no there there.

--Mike Barnicle has an article on Huffington Post (his first there since the primaries), in which he laments that the once-honorable John McCain is now MIA, "held captive by ideologues who dominate his strategy sessions and what is left of the Republican party." Safe bet that he'll be rained upon by the right for being a stooge of liberal MSNBC, both for the content and the venue of the piece.

It's been a little while since we played Q&A, so let's give it a go. Plenty of potential topics out there, what with an impending election, the state and city in fiscal crisis, and the rising menace of red communism. Or so I'm told.

Send me your questions in the comments to this post, and I'll do my best to answer in posts throughout the day.

Sarah Palin spoke thrice in the Granite State yesterday, and I was at all three: a couple of hundred people in a Dover gym; a few hundred on the Weirs Beach pier outside of Laconia; and several thousand at Salem High's football stadium. She delivered the same speech, from teleprompters, with almost no extemporizing; it was the same speech -- a toned-down, safe-as-houses speech stripped of the crowd-riling attacks on Obama -- that she switched to earlier this week.

In last night's third and final debate, Barack Obama was clearly determined to kneel down on the ball on every play, running out the clock no matter how tempting the opportunity to run up the score. John McCain appeared to have just emerged from a three-day cocoon of right-wing bloggers and talk radio, pumped full of indignation over things that the average persuadable voter doesn't know, or care, about.

I spent the day traipsing around the beautiful Granite State, in all its resplendent, multi-hued autumnal glory, to watch Gov. Sarah Palin deliver her stump speech in three venues. (More on that in a later post.) Palin, who not long ago was leading the attack on Barack Obama's connections to William Ayers -- "palling around with terrorists" -- has this week excised all such references from her vocabulary.

I tuned in to Jay Severin this evening, as I often do -- I can usually only take about 5-10 minutes, but I like to check in on as many sources as possible. He was saying that Barack Obama is a "Marxist," a "Manchurian candidate," a philosophical adherent to the same radical, communist agenda as William Ayers and Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- the usual.

It appears that McCain intends to bring up William Ayers in tomorrow night's debate -- apparently if you double-dare him to do something, he can't back down.

It's widely assumed that Obama has been goading McCain into this because he assumes that the ensuing exchange will benefit him. So I ask you: what do you think Obama will (or should) say in response to McCain challenging him to come clean and fully explain his relationship with Ayers the unrepentant terrorist?

It certainly seems as though the right wing of the blogosphere will be kept quite busy over the next three-and-a-half weeks -- so little time, and so many Obama scandals to investigate!

Over at National Review Online's blog, The Corner, Mark Hemmingway suspects -- based on, um, nothing -- that Tony Rezko may be telling the feds about nefarious dealings with a bank where Illinois State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias once worked.